Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Electronic media
and an obsession with instant gratification are denying us many of the pleasures that come with acquiring and experiencing creative arts

Call me a
purist, an antiquity—I don’t care. I still buy real books made of paper, ink,
and glue, and I continue to acquire CDs. Undoubtedly, the electronic age, what
with its iPads, iPods, tablets, smartphones, Kindle, e-books and other
devices, has brought wonders in terms of miniaturization, compression, and
speed of delivery. But for all its benefits, I cannot help but miss the old
days, the pre-1990s, when people still had to go to a store to buy their books
and music.

The reason is
rather simple. We have sacrificed our senses on the altar of instant
gratification. In this day and age, everything must be immediately available.
As long as one has access to an Internet connection, books, music, movies and
other creative art is downloadable. Wait a few minutes for all those 0s and 1s
to flow through the ether and voila!
You are now the proud owner of 65 minutes of music, a full novel, or a
feature-length movie.

What you’re not
getting in the process is the experience of acquisition. For me, nothing beats
the excitement of going to a bookstore and seeing what’s new on the shelves.
Sometimes I already know what I want, but cannot be sure that the store has it
in stock. Ironically, the small sense of frustration that comes when a store doesn’t have what I want reinforces the
pleasure on those occasions when it does. Another inimitable experience for me
is to come upon a book I wasn’t aware of. It’s a bit like meeting a stranger
for the first time. An unexpected, but ultimately rewarding, encounter. None of
this occurs when you log on to Amazon.com or other sites to download a book.
Any book.

And of course,
besides the small excitement of meeting a book in person (not to mention other
real people) are all the pleasures that come with holding, weighing, and
smelling a book. Moreover, I love the smell of bookstores. Visit, say, the
Paragraphe bookstore near the McGill University campus in Montreal (where as an
undergrad I spent countless hours and about as much money) or the London Review
of Books bookstore in London, which I visited recently, and you’ll know what I
mean about the smell. No computer will ever beat that.

Then there is
music. Your scribe likes all kinds of music, from classical, jazz, electronic,
to soundtracks, progressive rock, and metal (the Swedish death metal band Opeth
accompanied me all afternoon as I drafted my latest article for The Diplomat). The same joy of
discovery, of expectations, accompanies a trip to the store (I almost jumped
when I saw Anathema’s latest offering on the shelves at the HMV store in
London, an album that has yet to arrive in Taiwan). The smell mightn’t be
there, but chances are that some music will be playing in the background, or
someone who works at the store will help you discover something new (one vendor
at the music store in the B2 basement of the Eslite bookstore on Dunhua Rd.
knows of my interest in Japanese rock music—ACIDMAN among them—and has led me
in interesting directions. The same vendor I met, as a drag queen, during the
LGBT Pride parade last year. Again, try beating that experience if all you do
is download from the iTunes store!). I’m one of those who still enjoys
unwrapping a CD and going through the case and the booklets. Some labels still
go out of their way to provide engrossing visuals (if you’re into metal,
Nuclear Blast still does that, as does the British progressive rock label
Kscope). And those, too, have a distinct smell, one that I truly enjoy and that
sometimes (given the proximity of the olfactory and memory parts of the human
brain) transports me back in time (for example, some booklet have the smell of
Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears, which
I acquired in 1991 when it came out).

Besides the
olfactory and visual gratification of CDs or vinyls, which admittedly I do not
collect, is the sound itself. I was raised by a father who took music very,
very seriously. An engineer, my father designed, among other things, recording
studios. I remember as a child spending hours sitting on the floor in an audio
store, or at home, trying to hear the subtle changes in sound as my father
calibrated amps and speakers. It’s a science and an art, and my father often
taught vendors a few tricks in the process. Among them is the fact that the
best way to prove the worth of an amplifier and a pair of speakers (or now five
or even seven speaker, as we’re in the surround age) isn’t to blast the music,
but rather to play it at low volume (and if your speakers are not properly aligned, they will cancel each other out and give you the odd feeling that the pressure has shifted inside your head).

But who does
that nowadays, when almost everybody uses a computer, a smartphone, or an iPod
to listen to music? The thing is, you’re losing a whole lot when you limit
yourself to those devices. For one thing, .mp4 compression is awful
(something’s got to give, and low and high frequencies are trimmed to make the
files smaller). You probably won’t hear the difference if you limit yourself to
the earphones that come with your cellphone. But compare playback on a proper sound
system, and you’ll realize that you’d been looking at a world (if you’re not
stuck zombie-like on the screen of your smartphone like most people nowadays) in
which all the colors and contrasts are dimmed. Put that baby in the CD player
and, if you’re lucky enough and, say, Steve Wilson (of Porcupine Tree fame)
mixed the whole thing in 5.1 surround sound, an entire new universe will open
up for you. You will never get the visceral experience of hearing the last note
of Arvo Part’s In Principio (ECM) reverberating
through the room and your innards if you’re listening to it on your iPod—this I
can guarantee you. Music is physical, and depending on the room in which you
listen to it, the experience will be a different one (sound bounces off walls).

You will
therefore understand my sadness when, after completing my article this
afternoon, I went for a walk and visited one of my favorite local music stores,
Jason’s Records, which specializes in metal of all types, and received a so-so
response when I asked him how he was doing. I’ve been going there for years.
The owner knows me, and he also knows the kind of music that I like—so much so
that he’ll often play something for me without saying anything until I go to
the counter and, liking what I’ve been hearing, I ask him what’s playing.
Thanks to him, I’ve made many a wonderful discovery over the years (Swedish
doom/prog metal band Katatonia among them).

Business hasn’t
been very good. We really don’t want those small stores to close. Nor do we
want to forget what it’s like to truly experience, to experience in the full, a book or an album. Some of you
might be of a generation that never bought CDs, or never had a proper sound
system at home. Give it a try. Life is much more generous than you’d think. (Photo by the author.)